picker

In some of the posts of late, the subject of running pedals capable of it at 18v has come up. The advantage of that seems to be increased headroom. This seems to be the case on overdrive/distortion boxes, such as the Xotic SL drive, The Fulltone OCD drive and some Wampler pedals. That confuses my rapidly aging brain. Isn't the point of using distortion pedals to cause signal clipping, which is a result of exceeding available headroom? I can see the desirability of increased headroom in a compressor, like the Xotic SP, etc. But wouldn't that defeat the purpose of a dirt box? Can somebody help out a befuddled old fart, and explain this for me?

Yep, wiser to do i that way, and may you get top dollar for them. But shucks, I had to ask...

And I can supply 2 of those 3 Echoplexes for any brave enough to want to try the refurbishment themselves. They've been sitting in a closet for 20+ years, along with a Korg Stage Echo, which is closer to a Roland 201, but with the added bonus of voltage control. I had one EP3 some years back, and it sounded wonderful, but was a pain in the butt to maintain. The tapes were lubricated with graphite on the back, and you had to clean the whole tape path as well as the heads. Messy! I imagine tapes are even harder to come by than they were back then, and bloody costly when you can. I had a friend at the local radio station who gave me a 7"l reel of the tape they reloaded their Atlas carts with, and I reloaded my own cassettes/cartridges/whatever they were called. Tape of any sort is probably tough to find. Even so, I truly wish I still had it. IF you're gonna do some early Joe Walsh or Tommy Bolin, you can't beat 'em. Were you offering to make a gift of your unrefurbished EPs?

I'm expecting a Foxgear Echoes Delay Guitar Effect Pedal, which is supposed to deliver a convincing imitation of a Binson Echorec, for much less than the Catalinbread Echorec. I'll be interested to see if I can get "One Of These Days" out of it.

Do you run it at 9 or 18 volts?

I recently picked up a Dunlop EP103 delay. It's got some interesting switching possibilities, and some of them kinda sneak up on you if you're not careful. It took me quite a while and a few internet excursions to figure out what I had done to cut off the initial note, before the first repeat. But after I got it straightened out, I really like the tone of it. I read something online about "if you want the full EP experience", you need to get the EP101 preamp and run it in front of the delay. Apparently, it's a fairly low gain affair, intended to get a softish distortion with a darker tone, to somewhat replicate the tone of the Maestro EP3 tape echo. Hmmm. Anybody here ever go the whole route and buy both? By the way, I have the Xotic EP booster, which is supposed to produce a similar effect as the EP101, and I wonder if it would produce the "full EP experience" the same as the EP101...

My first electric was a Teisco Del Rey copy pf the Vox Phantom VI. My mom & dad bought it at a Gibson's discount store(what later became Walmart) for $50-$60, IIRC, in the mid to late 60's. In all honesty, I couldn't really say if it was a good guitar or not; I had no experience to make comparisons from. It did work well enough, although I couldn't tell you the exact functions of the various switches on it. I'm sure there were 2 pickup on and off switches(it was a two pickup model), and there weren't a whole scad of them, but there were at least 4, and more likely 5. The whammy bar stayed in tune, but didn't have a very wide range of pitch, and you couldn't pull up on it much at all, or the spring would fall out. I sometimes wish I still had it, and not only because guitars of that sort are going for ridiculously high prices these days. I would like to see if the silly thing had a decent tone in comparison with my current harem. I believe it was called a Domino. It was black with a white pickguard, and the neck was natural wood color, made of laminated strips, with a dark(possibly rosewood) fret board. I suspect it might be kind of tele-ish, Fender-ish for sure; the pickups were single coil. It would be nice to know. But I lost interest in it when I got a single pickup Gibson ES-140 3/4T, the first guitar I bought for myself.

What a schmuck! Reading Surfer Girl's story makes me sorry I bought the pedal. There are enough builders out there making pedals just as good or better that doing business with pus-heads like that isn't necessary.

Just picked up a Fulltone OCD V2 pedal. Fulltone had it on sale as a blem for $99, and I figured what the heck? It has an internal switch to select between true bypass & "Enhanced Bypass". as well as the one on top that selects between "high peak" & "low peak". I was wondering if anybody has experience with the pedal and the settings. How have you used it, and what did you think about it? Talk to me, dudes...

And another of my childhood heroes passes on. RIP, Gerry.

I can't find the ad right now, but there is a guy in Amarillo on Facebook Marketplace who is asking $2,150 for a 1986 Kramer Baretta in Metallic Orange, and wants an added $115 for shipping. I gotta wonder if he fell asleep back then and is just now waking up...

My 2020 was hours of boredom punctuated by seconds of sheer terror. Pretty much like I expect 2021 to be.

I'm positively glad 2020 is almost over for good.

I'll have to check them out. Everybody seems to be going for the mini pedal thing these days.

Is there such a thing as a Djentleman? Asking for a friend...

Sounds great! One-stop shop- ehr, stomp- for set-it-and-forget-it Hendrix, Trower, Gilmour- and [YOUR NAME HERE] 'vibe 'n' fuzz tones. Throw a li'l echo after that... ! Mission accepted- that is, something like that, simulated backwards-recording sounds, would be EXACTLY what I would be throwin' into that Carl Martin Purple Moon before long, using my guitars volume-knob, my VFE BumbleBee "Slow Gear"/"volume-swell" type pedal, or my volume-pedal. Sometimes I'm all about that! I hadn't thought of the "reverse echo" thing, great idea! I used to have a Morley Attack Control pedal, one of the ones that had an "electric pick". When it toughed the strings, it would clamp the volume down to nothing, then bring it back up at a rate controlled by the treadle. Way back was slow, down was fast. I did some reverse echo tricks with it. Like all the Morley pedals back then, it was a huge, clunky, chrome plated monstrosity that took up waaaaay to much real estate on my pedal board, but I sometimes wish I had it back.

I contacted him through his website, and asked him about the tone I mentioned. His reply was pretty short, but confirmed what I thought. It seemed to me that when I heard that, he was picking a note on one of his E,A or D strings, then sliding up to a note 2 or 3 frets higher, and adding some vibrato by shaking the slide. I'm thinking the winding on the strings contributes to it. I'm sure it takes some practice to get it, and yes Caevan, his amp & pedal rig has to have a lot to do with it. With Derek Trucks, he'll get the 1st & 2nd notes, then silde on through to higher ones, which seems to increase what I'm talking about. Got to work on this, it's such a cool sound!

T-man! Welcome back aboard! Glad to hear you are well, and hope you are making mucho musica! How's the quarantine impacting the scene over there? Has forgetting to put on your mask and running back to the car to get it become a competitive sport over there? I'm thinking about starting a league for it over here. Good to hear from you! Try not to be a stranger, my friend. Us low-end types gotta stick together!

I can dig that. Somehow, I unintentionally moved away from whammy bar guitars some years back. I did go more for Gibson-ish humbucker type guitars, but it wasn't intentional that I stopped using whammys. I loved the locking tuner type setups, like the PRS's, Strat Pluses, and the one Tom Anderson I had. I had a bit of a vocabulary of techniques I liked, admittedly limited, but fun and useful to me. I've thought about getting a Stetsbar or something like that for my Hamer or ES-340, but they are SOOOOO expensive, and slack storage issues seem likely with the strings breaking on the nut at an angle. I've recently put together some partscaster strats with locking tuners, and I bought a Mexican Hendrix Strat, but the bars don't seem to go as far down as I used to get strats to. Believe it or not, I had really good results with a Jazzmaster vibrato tailpiece I had a long time ago. It didn't go as extremely low down as a strat, etc., but it stayed in tune and worked quite easily. I was too poor to afford a Floyd or Kahler, or any of the other designs. So, I much lack experience with locking nut vibrato systems, and I gather that's more a blessing than a curse. Seems like a lot of folks didn't like the tone the got out of them.

So, I ordered THIS as my Christmas present to me...

I couldn't make head or tail out of Chord Chemistry. But, it has been a while since tried. Maybe I should get another copy...

Somebody posted a link to this video, and I really like the tone he gets on slide. I noticed he seems to lean into the lower strings, and gets what I describe as a vocal tone, somewhat reminiscent of what Derek Trucks gets. Any of y'all get that kind of sound?

Scott, this is where I get confused. I thought if you ran two 8 ohm speakers in series, you lowered the impedance to 4 ohm. Have I got that wrong?

What impedance do you wind up when you run a 4 ohm & 8 ohm speaker, in series and/or parallel? Does it make any difference which one is first in line? I get confused about that stuff.

I found footage of George with the guitar, on the Real Love video. It's right about 2:23 in.